I hope I anger no one by waxing poetic about the LHC; it is an awesome machine. When it is running in production, the protons going through it will be travelling within 30cm a second of the speed of light. That speed (beyond which it is impossible to accelerate) is 299,792 km a second. The accelerated protons will transit the 27 km ring 11,000 times each second! The power of this accelerator is about 100 million times that of the first cyclotrons tested by Ernest Lawrence at UC Berkeley (let's hear it for Oski the Bear!). Those were only a foot or so in circumference, but the basic idea behind the devices is unchanged.

It is one helluva microscope!

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Eudaimonia